Fifteen years later, has Barbara Lynchâ€™s original flagship been reborn?

How does a storied restaurant renew itself? Short of renovations, chef changes, and concept overhaulsâ€”tactics that places like Clio, UpStairs on the Square, and Oak Long Bar + Kitchen have triedâ€”the frequent answer to the question is another question: Why fix it if it ainâ€™t broke? Chefs and owners will tell you theyâ€™re constantly tinkering and refreshing and making improvements. But that doesnâ€™t always translate into results a diner can see and taste.

The question comes up as No. 9 Park marks its 15th birthday this month. Barbara Lynch has moved forward and outward, with her shrewd sense of style and business and her rigid discipline. More of the Italian expertise she learned while cooking the cityâ€™s best pasta at Galleria Italiana, and later at No. 9? Thatâ€™s now at Sportello. Fish, oysters, and casual excitement? Bâ€‰&â€‰G. Artisanal meats and farm-to-table cookery? The Butcher Shop. Spectacular, dramatic, expensive luxury in the middle of the worst economy since the Depression? Menton. Lynch tries what she wants and doesnâ€™t listen to others, as she proudly told a group of international chefs in August at the Noma/Momofukuâ€“sponsored MAD conference, in Copenhagen. The word she kept coming back to was â€śballsy.â€ť

But No. 9 hasnâ€™t evolved with her. Menton is clearly her flagship now. No. 9 still has good service, if not quite the seamless, silken perfection it once did under the duo of Kerri Foley, Lynchâ€™s childhood friend from the South Boston projects, and Garrett Harker. The wine service, under Cat Silirie, who now directs wine for all BL Gruppo restaurants, is as low-key and expert as ever. No. 9 is still full of businessmen and pols who love being able to walk a few steps to the front door, and young couples whoâ€™ve saved up. This is still a place to pop the question.

Lynch, one of the cityâ€™s champion nurturers of talent, is now â€śfounder and CEO,â€ť though, and not executive chef (a title that Ken Oringer has kept at Clio, which last year celebrated its own 15th birthday). This year, following the departure of chef Patrick Campbell to Eastern Standard, Lynch bestowed the mantle of â€śchef de cuisineâ€ť on Scott Jonesâ€”who, like Colin Lynch, the executive chef of the entire BL Gruppo, is a house-grown talent. Is No. 9 recognizably Jonesâ€™s? Fifteen years later, has the restaurant been renewed?

Salade jardiniĂ¨re with fried Ipswich clams.

Not yet. The physical space looks just the same as I remember it from when the restaurant first openedâ€”the same dove grays and subtle browns and oddly formal beaded-glass sconces and chandeliers. And to my eye it all looks tired, particularly the room facing Park Street: The floorâ€™s dark stain has worn so much that the dull, light original shows through where people walk. Two sets of guests called it intentional, a sign that the place has history. It didnâ€™t look that way to me.

As a restaurant, No. 9 feels like itâ€™s in search of a new identityâ€”on its way to someplace new but not there yet. The dishes on the $69 three-course prix fixe are often unfocused, with a couple of elements more complicated than you wish they would be (a seven-course chefâ€™s-tasting menu is also available for $112). The variability of doneness and flavor, the monotonous presentation along one side of a plateâ€”whole dishes huddle in a diagonal cornerâ€”arenâ€™t what you associate with Lynchâ€™s need for variety. Which isnâ€™t to say that you wonâ€™t have memorably good dinners here. You will, and theyâ€™ll feature impeccable ingredients. But until Lynch decides what the new stamp on the menu will be, and whether that stamp will really be Jonesâ€™s, itâ€™s a work in progress.

Where I could recognize Jonesâ€™s own tastes, I got interested. He says that he likes proteins firm, which I find as refreshing and welcome a declaration as his saying that sous-vide-style meat is banned in his kitchen. â€śI feel strongly about real cooking,â€ť he told me. He wants his cooks, and himself, to be strongly in touch with the food theyâ€™re preparing. Yes! Every piece of meat and fish is roasted in a pan on the stove, not in the oven, so cooks can keep an even closer watch on it.

Lamb worked when cooked medium well, served in chunks in one of Jonesâ€™s neat rectilinear lines, like de-shished shish kebabs. Though the date, ginger, shallot, and curry paste sounded odd, it brought out both the sweetness and the meatiness of the lamb, and could even be called inspired. But the pine nuts, anchovies, and sunflowers on the same plate only added confusion.

Jones, who studied biochemistry as a Harvard undergraduate and cancer biology as a graduate student at the Harvard Medical School, has plenty of ideas (and with his spouse, Ben Wolfe, a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, writes about some of them on bostonmagazine.com). He told me that he loves both hazelnuts and mayo, and there were indeed aiolis and green goddesses and plain peppery mayos on many of the appetizers, appearing to best effect as a garlicky green-goddess-like dressing over heirloom tomatoes, and a buttermilk-dijon dressing on a baby-vegetable salad with buttermilk-and-semolina-dredged Ipswich clams. Those clams would hold up well in a North Shore taste-off, and could be a plate all on their own.

The best idea Jones mentioned, though, was one that will let him work with guests to tailor menus that will suit both them and him. Jones told me that he wants to give customers more control of what they eat, by asking what they do and donâ€™t like, how many courses they want, and whether or not they want to be surprised.